Orchestra knocks piece out of park

July 12, 2004|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic.

The Grant Park and Ravinia festivals over the weekend mounted an unofficial competition to see which could produce the more important Chicago "first." Grant Park won hands down by giving the local premiere of John Corigliano's Symphony No. 2 for String Orchestra.

The Grant Park Orchestra is devoting much of the summer to a survey of the symphonic works of Corigliano, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer perhaps most familiar to Chicago audiences through his former affiliations with the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera. Grant Park will inaugurate its new home, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, with a Corigliano commission, "Midsummer Fanfare," as part of Friday's gala opening concert.

The fanfare will have to be a knockout indeed to match the coruscating power, eerie beauty and sheer inventive fantasy of the String Symphony, which Carlos Kalmar conducted Saturday in the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater.

Written for the Boston Symphony, the 40-minute work won the 2001 Pulitzer in music. The five movements are structured as an arch, while the music is further unified by a recurring motto and pitch centers. It is a significant addition to the modern string orchestra repertory.

The muted, otherworldly strings of the opening "Prelude" create a murmurous haze of dissonant sound gently broken by what sounds like a consort of viols playing far away. The music then erupts into the violent, choppy chords of the "Scherzo," laced by the thrashings of a solo quartet and frenetic banshee cries. The central "Nocturne" echoes the bleak, lamenting string writing of Shostakovich.

The "Fugue" moves different themes through the various choirs at different but precisely calibrated speeds, creating ear-catching harmonic tensions and what sounds like a swarm of angrily buzzing insects. The music's manic energies slowly wind down in the "Postlude," where the ethereal C-sharp of a solo violin floats high above the remaining strings.

Kalmar, the orchestra's principal conductor, "gets" Corigliano's music better than any maestro I have heard, as witness his previous Grant Park performances of the Symphony No. 1, which were far superior to Daniel Barenboim's readings with the CSO.

The Second Symphony must be felt deep within as much as conducted, and Kalmar did both exceedingly well. The Grant Park strings stood revealed in the clear Harris Theater acoustics as a marvelously responsive choir. They threw themselves into this tough, unfamiliar music with admirable intensity and precision.

Kalmar's exemplary control of the long line, combined with his keen regard for instrumental detail, also was evident in the orchestra's expert accounts of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Prelude to Act I of Wagner's "Lohengrin." Ilya Kaler was replacing the indisposed Isabelle van Keulen as concerto soloist. The Russian-born violinist recently joined the DePaul School of Music faculty and he clearly is a prestigious catch for the university and the city's musical life. Prokofiev's spiky virtuosity, quirky lyricism and elegant grotesquerie are like mother's milk to Kaler; his idiomatic, rock-solid performance made one adore this masterpiece all the more.

Meanwhile, Ravinia was in the midst of a Sergei Rachmaninoff festival, an event blessed by the Rachmaninoff Foundation and attended by the composer's grandson, Alexandre. The mini-festival's central event, Friday night, was the world premiere of a new video work designed by the Portuguese visual artist Juliao Sarmento to accompany the symphonic poem, "The Isle of the Dead." Leonard Slatkin conducted the Chicago Symphony in an all-Rachmaninoff program that also included the early, popsy "Caprice Bohemien" and Piano Concerto No. 3. Garrick Ohlsson was the digitally formidable if rather cold-blooded soloist.

What's intriguing about the video is not the way it treats the eponymous Arnold Bocklin painting that inspired "The Isle of the Dead" but, rather, that it functions in "real time."

An engineer at a computer keyboard processes the orchestral sound that in turn shapes the speed and rhythm of the pretty visuals. These were projected onto two large screens at the sides of the pavilion and a screen on the lawn.

I know orchestras everywhere are turning to visual gimmicks to help freshen the experience and lure new audience members. But that's all most of these things are -- gimmicks. The artist teases you by revealing only parts of the painting at a time, overlaying them with pulsing "vapor trails" before finally revealing the entire painting.

I commend Ravinia for trying experiments of this type -- if a summer festival can't do so, what can? I must say, however, that I found the video an annoying distraction: The CSO's reading of the score was vivid enough that it did not require any visual assistance.